Ireland today launched a legal bid at the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to stop the start of operations at a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant at Britain's Sellafield nuclear facility.
"We have received papers from the Irish government and we will make an announcement about a hearing date later," a tribunal spokeswoman said.
A hearing at the tribunal, part of the United Nations' organisation, would take about two to three days with a judgment announced two to three weeks later, she added.
Last month the Minister of State for Public Enterprise, Mr Joe Jacob, said Ireland would take legal action to halt the commissioning of the Sellafield mixed oxide (MOX) Plant (SMP) in Cumbria, northwest England.
"Having fully exhausted all other avenues open to us to no avail, the legal proceedings...are now being pursued," he said in a statement on October 26.
In October Britain gave the go ahead to open SMP at the extensive Sellafield complex because it said the economic case for opening outweighed social and environmental disadvantages.
But environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are currently challenging the decision in London's High Court and the SMP will not be opened until after the judicial review.
The British decision provoked protest here, which has long campaigned for the closure of the existing Sellafield facilities just across the Irish sea.
The legal action - based on what it says are contraventions by Britain of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea - also seeks to stop international movements of radioactive materials associated with the MOX plant in and around the Irish Sea.
The State says it plans to ask the Hamburg-based tribunal to order an immediate suspension of the MOX plant's authorisation and international transport pending a decision from an international arbitration tribunal it wants set up to resolve the dispute.
It wants hearings on the matter held before the MOX plant becomes operational, which it said could be as early as November 23. The plant is designed to mix plutonium with uranium oxides to form a nuclear fuel to be burnt in reactors.
Earlier today a parliamentary committee leader in Norway said Oslo would consider legal action to force Britain to curb radioactive emissions from Sellafield.
"If we find that we have the grounds for a legal challenge, then we are willing to use that as a last resort," Bror Yngve Rahm, leader of the parliamentary energy and environment committee, told Reuters.